Las aventuras de Cucuruchito y Pinocho (Carlos Véjar Jr., 1942).

As in the case of Pro Patria (Guillermo Calles, 1932), this movie is anything but lost. Sadly, original negatives for both films are in the vaults of the same private archive in California, unattainable for researchers and film lovers.

Hopefully, those valuable old nitrate negatives will be made available before they are lost completely to nitrate decomposition.

Las aventuras de Cucuruchito y Pinocho was the second color feature film and the first fantasy film for children made in Mexico. A few sources catalog this movie as an animated color film, and that is wrong; though characters and settings belong to the fairy tale world, players are actual people.

This movie is a good example of how Mexican film industry was a melting pot, where talents from several countries and fields of activity contributed to production. In this particular case, several famous Spanish exiles[1] and other Spaniards, as well as an ex-Hollywood cinematographer, joined Mexican artists and technicians to make the film.

CIMESA produced the film. Its partners were Gonzalo Elvira y Rumayor, Mexican, and Miguel Mezquíriz, Spanish.

Carlos Véjar Jr. wrote the script, based on a play written by exiles Salvador Bartolozzi and his partner Magda Donato[2], heads of INBA’s[3] child theater program. Bartolozzí’s original illustrations and designs for the stage inspired the movie’s sets, costumes, and make-up.

Salvador Bartolozzi was a versatile artist. He outstood as illustrator, cartoonist, publisher; theater art director, and costume designer in his native Spain; moreover, he had a reputation as an innovator of children literature and theater. He wrote for children under the motto “mejorar divirtiendo”

Magda Donato collaborated with Bartolozzi in many of his projects. She was an accomplished intellectual, journalist, literary translator, and actress. At 14 years old, she would already write short stories for newspapers and magazines. A pair of Texas periodicals published a few of her stories when she was still a teenager, and then in the 1940s[4]. She was part of the “Generación del 27”.

Mexican Carlos Toussaint and Spanish exile Vicente Petit shared the production design responsibilities. Petit, famous as artist and decorator in Spain, made his debut in Mexico with this film.

Composer Juan García Esquivel took charge of musical direction. Years later, he became famous in the United States as “the King of Spage Age Pop.”

The legendary Francisco Gabilondo Soler Cri-Cri created and performed some of the songs, and also dubbed animal characters.

Ross Fisher, formerly of Hollywood, was the director of photography. In 1936, he had his first experience with color film (Los siete cabritos y el lobo, animated film produced and directed by Roberto A. Morales in 1936).

Producers opted for a color system invented by a Mexican for Las aventuras de Cucuruchito y Pinocho. The negative later went to the Cinecolor lab in Burbank, California, for developing. Producer Elvira personally supervised the processing of the film.

Alicia Rodríguez and Martha Ofelia Galindo were child actresses, both involved in INBA’s theater programs. The two followed brilliant careers on stage, film, and television, and were active until recently. Taking part in this film brought good opportunities to Alicia and Martha Ofelia. The latter was even called for auditions at the MGM studios in New York in 1944[5], while Alicia won a Mexican Academy award in 1945, for El secreto de la solterona.

Carlos Véjar Jr., the director, is worth a mention too. He outstood as illustrator and cartoonist; he even worked at Walt Disney studios for some time. In the film industry, he explored screenplay writing, production, direction, title designing, and acting. He was the first Mexican filmmaker in making a 3D movie, El corazón y la espada (in 1953, with codirector Edward Dein).

With the collaboration of such array of talents, it is not surprising that Las aventuras de Cucuruchito y Pinocho got praises by several film reporters and critics. That is the case of Hortensia Elizondo[6]. Her review of the movie[7] is reproduced verbatim as follows. It reveals some unknown details about the film:

Some sources affirm that the producers and distributors had problems with Walt Disney because he claimed “Pinocchio” –the character and the name- was his intellectual property. We have not found documents that prove the conflict, but the sources are most probably right. At any rate, Salvador Bartolozzi created the “el Pinocho español” (the Spanish Pinocchio) in the middle 1910s, long before Disney became involved in the film industry.

In spite of any problem, Las aventuras de Cucuruchito y Pinocho was distributed and exhibited in Texas in 1944, 1945 and 1946. It ran successfully in Cuba, where it premiered at the Teatro Payret, in la Habana, on October 1-10, 1943. The movie arrived in Spain in 1945, and countless theaters exhibited it. Spanish audiences had not forgotten Bartolozzi and Donato.

Color fantasy film production was abandoned in Mexico after the making of Las aventuras de Cucuruchito y Pinocho. Fifteen years later, CLASA and director René Cardona revived the trend with Pulgarcito.

We believe rescuing every extant film is worth the effort, since any film footage is a witness of history, both of motion picture and of culture. In the case of Las aventuras de Cucuruchito y Pinocho, that is particulary true, as it stands as:

a good example of the multinational character of Mexican film industry;